It started with the phone calls.
The first one came as I was driving to work on Monday. When my phone rang I noticed that the call was from some far away area code, so I chose to ignore it until I arrived at the office. When I did call back a recorded message said, “Sorry, this number does not accept incoming calls.”
That was when I realized this probably wasn’t going to be anyone I wanted to speak to. But as it turned out I did anyway, because the caller buzzed me back less than 10 minutes later. It was Ali informing me that “we are offering IT services at modest rate.” Note that the article “a” was missing from that sentence.
Soon more phone calls began pouring in from other distant locales, and emails started popping up on my computer from people with names like Garima, Sidhra and Lavesh.
That’s when I realized they were all vying for my business. They were looking to build my website. See, I had decided some time ago that I needed to establish my own website and I began building a rudimentary one over the weekend through a company I won’t name here.
In all fairness, the company seems legitimate. I chose one of their cheaper self-building options which would allow me to cobble together something that looks reasonably professional. That was on Sunday, and apparently it was a call to action for the company’s web designers. And every one of them seems bound and determined to get me to invest in upgrades.
That was pretty much how my day went Monday. And it continued on into Tuesday, Wednesday and … well, it’s still going on. The fact is, I’ve been getting so many phone calls I’ve simply started hanging up on them.
I have no doubt that most of these web designers are probably good and would likely design something better than I’ll come up with, but I kind of like the idea of creating my own website. I’m also quite certain that most of these people have been calling from India, as they all seem to have the same heavy accent.
I couldn’t care less about that, but it got me to thinking. So I did a little research and here’s what I found out: India ranks among the most popular countries in the world for outsourcing web design, according to Quora, a Mountainview-based question-and-answer website. Another company notes that seven of the top 10 web design and development companies in the world happen to have a headquarters in India.
Brain Technosys, an offshore web development firm with a strong presence in India, said people turn to India because of its talent, innovation and creativity. But that’s not the only reason.
Good web developers in the U.S. earn anywhere from $50 to $80 per hour, the company said, but the hourly pay for their counterparts in India can run as low as $15 an hour.
That’s a pretty big gap — and a pretty good deal.
But I still don’t like being inundated with emails and phone calls. It’s the same kind of feeling I get when I walk onto the lot of car dealership — that feeling that you’re suddenly in everyone’s crosshairs. Not to be shot at, mind you, but rather to be sold something.
So that’s what I’m dealing with these days. I suspect that I’m going to be sold something. It may not happen tomorrow, or even next week. But I’m quite certain that they’ll eventually catch me in a moment of weakness.